Regarding the Dalrymple article referred to in posting 18.197 and comments on it, I suspect it is true, perhaps even quantifiably so, that Abraham Lincoln was a better statesman than George Bush is. Statesmanship and eloquence are skills that not all individuals possess in the same degree, nor do all individual speakers of a language share the same vocabulary.

There is a tradition of linguistic research that goes under the broad rubric ''philology'' that lies at the intersection of rhetoric, textual analysis and grammatical description. In this tradition, grammar and eloquence are not so strictly differentiated, and for the practitioners of this discipline, contemporary formal linguistics must seem ''airy and disembodied'' indeed.

However, its disembodiedness is a core methodological tenet, based on the premise, endemic in modern sciences, that insight into the nature of a totality can be gained by decomposing it into its component parts and studying them separately. The notion of 'grammar' from this perspective is rather narrow--encompassing generalizations about what constitutes a grammatical syntactic format in a language independently of what speakers choose to express with those formats.

Formal linguistics is the study of grammar in this narrow sense. But not because it equates grammar in this narrow sense with language itself. On the contrary: precisely *because* there is much more to language than grammar, it is fruitful to divorce grammar from communication and other facets of language, and observe it in isolation, in the same way that chemists find some utility in divorcing the components of a compound of interest from one another. This approach is obviously not holistic, and is not intended to be, but not because it denies the complexity of language, but only because of the limited scope of the task it sets before itself. Some of Gross, Kravchenko and Dalrymple's remarks suggest they believe that linguists are unaware that there is more to language than grammar. Note that there is little likelihood that some unexpected epiphany will cause the chemists of the world to ''abruptly awaken, rubbing their eyes in utter disbelieve, as they mutter; 'you mean, it's not just [molecules] after all...?''' It is the linguists' narrow notion of knowledge of grammar that Pinker is claiming to be invariant among human beings. Eloquence is entirely another matter, and there is no doubt that there is too little of it these days.